J. Dillon Brown
PhD. Student
University of Pennsylvania

Difficulty Changing the Subject: George Lamming and Modernist Reading

Critics traditionally identify difficulty as a salient feature in George Lamming’s novels, an identification that Lamming himself encourages. Indeed, the complexity of Lamming’s writing inspired many contemporary reviewers to dismiss his work as obfuscating legerdemain, and for scholars, Lamming’s work seems vulnerable to accusations of elitism and inconsideration for the very peasants he advocated placing at the center of the Caribbean artistic conscience. The proposed paper will examine the notion of difficulty in Lamming’s novels, refuting criticisms of disingenuousness and proposing a view of his literary difficulty not as elitist, but as an artistic expression of a theory of ethical subjectivity tending towards egalitarianism.

The paper will consider the formal and narrative features of two novels – In the Castle of My Skin and Of Age and Innocence – examining how Lamming employs the trope of reading in his work to illustrate a particular critical, yet resolutely empathetic relation to society advocated throughout Lamming’s oeuvre as necessary to decolonization. Ultimately, the analysis will suggest that the novels oblige an enactment by the reader of precisely this relation, centered on mutual respect, questioning intellect, and a cooperative negotiation of meaning. The paper will propose that Lamming, while fully aware of the paradoxes and pitfalls of his chosen mode of address, employs a modernist technique traditionally associated with aristocratic scorn in order to formulate and exemplify a theory of decolonized Caribbean subjectivity encompassing issues such as the intersection of personal and political sovereignty,